Jazzman Buddy Collette was born in Watts in 1921, making him 89 when he died this month. Imagine how different Los Angeles was then, especially for an African American. L.A. was not the deep south, but blacks here were segregated downtown and along Central Avenue. Actually we don’t have to imagine too much about the city Collette inhabited. He left behind a record of his memories that hold some fascinating insights...

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Jazzman Buddy Collette was born in Watts in 1921, making him 89 when he died this month.

Imagine how different Los Angeles was then, especially for an African American. L.A. was not the deep south, but blacks here were segregated downtown and along Central Avenue.

Actually we don’t have to imagine too much about the city Collette inhabited. He left behind a record of his memories that hold some fascinating insights.

He recalls Watts as a place where there was plenty of land at a reasonable price for African Americans. And where friends helped each other build their houses.

In a 1999 interview with journalist Barbara Isenberg, he recalled that you lived among Mexicans and Chinese and Japanese and Italians and other blacks.

And that everybody went to the same school, and everybody got along.

He picked up the alto saxophone at age 12 and soon began playing along Central Avenue, often with another future jazz great, Charles Mingus.

They would hang out on Central trying to meet jazz musicians. Collette recalled a place called the 54th Street Drugstore where players would mingle with celebrities like Jack Johnson, the heavyweight boxing champion.

Collette came of age in that segregated world, and went on to help integrate the musician unions in LA.

He also saw up close how Central Avenue, like so much else in LA then, overlapped with the underworld.

John Buntin, the author of last year’s notable history, titled L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City, found a remarkable oral history that Collette recorded.